Long after the fact, what I did next would seem less than brilliant. Okay,
Why exactly I felt no fear, I couldn’t swear to. Maybe what I witnessed on 9/11 makes all other potential threats seem trivial. Maybe now that my daughter has left home, I’m done with being circumspect 24/7. Maybe it was simply a residual by-product of excessive caffeine consumption, but I’d reached a point in my life when potential threats no longer cowed me. Something spurred me forward... in this case, through the shadows behind the Blend.
For a moment, I couldn’t make out much more than a silhouette at the end of the alley. The misty darkness was too thick, the streetlight’s illumination stopping at the sidewalk. I considered this might be a homeless person, even though the homeless were much more prevalent in the funkier East Village than the more affluent West, and when they took to sleeping (or passing out) on the New York pavement, authorities picked them up and delivered them to city shelters.
Shelters weren’t a picnic. The homeless avoided them for many reasons, including fear of theft—of what little property they had—and violence, or unwillingness to comply with the shelter’s rules. But the imperfect system was better than some of the bleaker alternatives.
When I’d first managed the Blend, in my twenties, I’d come across a homeless man during a morning walk. I’d dropped Joy off at kindergarten and was in no hurry to return to our little apartment. Matt had stumbled in during the wee hours, zonked after an endless flight from somewhere—Hawaii, Mexico, Costa Rica... take your pick. Silly me wanted to surprise him by doing his unpacking, but I was the one who’d gotten the surprise. I’d found it buried at the bottom of his Pullman: a box of condoms.
For a few pathetic seconds, I’d tried to tell myself that my young husband had bought the box upon touchdown at JFK, anticipating his return to our bed. But it was far too easy to examine the box and see that there were not in fact twenty-four foiled packets inside, as the black box with the purple lettering proclaimed. There were fourteen.
During his three weeks away from me, Matt had used ten condoms—and I doubted very much he’d used them during the ninety-minute taxi ride from Queens to Manhattan.
It wasn’t the last time Matt would stray. For years he would deny it. The condom box, he would later explain, was something he’d had on hand for weeks before the trip and packed in case I decided to fly out and join him for a weekend. I’d accepted such a lame excuse for the same reason all wives of cheating husbands do: I didn’t want my marriage to end.
On that particular morning, the morning I found the condoms, I was still too much in love with Matt. I also loved managing his mother’s coffeehouse, baking for the customers, having little Joy play in the Blend after school, usually with my mother-in-law stopping in for a visit. Every busy morning and sunny afternoon felt achingly familiar, like the days of my childhood in Pennsylvania, when I practically lived with my grandmother in her Italian grocery.
That box of condoms was a live grenade thrown into the middle of my sweet, cozy life. I was shocked, hurt, furious. Matt was still snoring away in bed, and I wanted to throttle him in his sleep, throw the box at him, demand an explanation. But I didn’t—
Little Joy was calling me. It was time to take her to school. So I took her. Then I took myself on a long walk along the river to think. The February morning was frigid, but I didn’t care. I chose a path that would insure me some privacy to consider Matt, my marriage, and what I’d discovered. And then I discovered something else—a body.
I still remember how the corpse had been dressed, with so many layers of sweatshirts he couldn’t close the buttons on his long, soiled overcoat. The coat was a finely tailored garment, the kind a CEO’s new wife might have given away during the city’s annual winter coat drive, gleefully making room in her husband’s closets for more fashionable frocks.
A two-wheeled handcart stood beside the frozen man, overflowing with three bulging green garbage bags, presumably his only possessions. Newspapers covered his torso and legs, a collection of dailies others had read and tossed. One stiff hand gripped an empty bottle of vodka, the drunk’s method for keeping warm, which killed you all the faster when you were out in the cold.
This was every struggling, transplanted New Yorker’s nightmare: to end up alone, destitute, living on the street... I called 911 and waited for the ambulance to come, watched the paramedics zip him into a body bag and wheel him away on a stretcher.
There was no ID on the dead man, and I wondered who he’d been in life, how he’d fallen so far, whether anyone would cry over his death. Then I realized I was crying, since I’d been too late to care.
I wandered home, feeling weak and mortal, my anger chilled by dread. My grandmother had passed away by then, my father was serving time in a penitentiary for running an illegal sports book, and my mother had been gone from my life since I was seven.
If I left Matt, Joy would come with me. But would I be able to properly provide for her, give her what she might want or need? In the dead of winter, in my early twenties, I didn’t think I could. And Matt was far from a harsh or aloof partner, quite the opposite. When he was actually around, he’d been an understanding companion, an adoring lover, and a doting dad. Like it or not, I was still very passionately in love with my husband.
Thus began my master’s program in ignoring and pretending, tolerating and rationalizing:
It would take me a decade to douse my burning infatuation for my larger-than-life husband, corral my runaway fears. At twenty-nine, I would finally build up the courage to quit the job I’d loved, managing the Blend for Madame, and move to New Jersey with Joy. A shaky collection of part-time employment followed, which led to a viable career as a freelance writer—first with a regular culinary column in a local paper, then trade magazine pieces, and even one article in the
It would take me another ten years to forgive my child’s father, decide and admit what I really wanted (this partnership in the Blend), and stop making my life about hiding and withdrawing, worrying and retreating, even when things looked dubious or dangerous... like now.
As I continued to move through the shadows of my alley, I became more and more concerned about the slumped-over man. Was he just passed out? Knocked out? Or worse?
Within a few feet of him, I finally saw that he was too well dressed to be homeless. His gorgeous tan jacket was butter-soft suede; his fine brown slacks, the caramelized color of espresso crema. Neither appeared worn or ripped. He was propped in a sitting position against our back wall, his arms and legs limp.
I remembered Madame’s stories—the poets and painters of ye olde hipster Village. But things had changed too much since the days of the beat generation. Today’s West Villagers didn’t get falling down drunk on a nightly basis. The residents of this era were all about civilized, progressive attitudes and sophisticated tastes. And it just wasn’t sophisticated to get so blotto you peed in St. Luke’s churchyard and vomited on your obscenely expensive Bruno Magli shoes.
The unconscious man appeared to be attractive, too, not just well dressed. His sturdy, clean-shaven chin rested on a solid chest. The stranger’s head was bowed, his black hair cut just like Matt’s, in a neat, masculine Caesar. In fact, if I hadn’t seen Matt inside the Blend, I might have mistaken this man for my ex.
“Hello?” I called softly. “Are you all right?”
Was he even breathing? I bent over the body, peered into his face and gasped. The man on the ground wasn’t a stranger. It took me a few seconds, but the memory came back to me... the man in my alley was Federico Gostwick.
Matt was right, I realized. Ric looked as if he’d hardly aged one year, let alone ten. I could see he was breathing; and, thank goodness, he wasn’t dead, but he obviously needed help.
My hand slipped under my apron. I felt around for the small, hard rectangle in my jeans pocket, but it wasn’t there. My cell phone was missing. I couldn’t call 911 because I’d left it behind the counter!
